Former SBAC member: “Don’t trust us”

You can’t trust any of the CCISD committees, or so says someone purporting to be a former School Boundary Advisory Committee (SBAC) member.

CCISD would have you believe that not only are its committees representative of the communities it serves, but also that those committees always have the best interests of CCISD students at heart.

But, according to Andre Frilot of Seabrook, that is not the case. According to a comment that Mr. Frilot left on this blog, you need to show up to every single meeting of a CCISD committee and voice your concerns, not wait until after recommendations are released, or else the committee is most likely going to do whatever CCISD’s shadowy power-brokers command them to do. Of note, Mr. Frilot served on the 2011-2012 SBAC, one where (shockingly!) no students in Seabrook were forced to change schools.

Mr. Frilot’s comment speaks volumes about how CCISD committees really work. Every committee is charged with making “recommendations” to the trustees, but before trustees take any action, the recommendations are released to the public for review. That’s when the public is supposed to be given the opportunity to offer input on them, so that changes can be made, again, in the best interests of students and the community. Let’s use the recent SBAC as an example.

The SBAC was comprised of supposedly randomly picked community members who had indicated they were interested in serving on such a committee. But you’ll notice that there were some areas of the district pointedly excluded from representation on the SBAC committee. Nevertheless, the parents of the 42,000 students in CCISD have been led to believe that the SBAC, serving on their behalf, would offer a recommendation that served the community’s best interests.

The SBAC met for several months and made its preliminary recommendations in January 2019; a public comment period then began, which included public hearings. However, Mr. Frilot’s comment reveals what has been long suspected: public comment on CCISD committee recommendations is merely for show. According to Mr. Frilot, parents who were concerned about potential redistricting implications made a big mistake by waiting until the SBAC’s preliminary recommendations were released. Every parent whose child could have been affected should have attended every single SBAC meeting, because by the time the recommendations came out, the SBAC had already decided what its final recommendations would be. Of course it made a few token changes so that it could pretend like it had responded to public feedback, but in reality, the die had already been cast.

Those public hearings were dog and pony shows, meant to trick the community into believing they had a real say. The truth is that the big decisions had already been made, in no small part because CCISD stacked the SBAC with loyal lackeys ready to implement the orders of the cabal, in exchange for leaving their neighborhoods largely untouched.

In short, Mr. Frilot says that we should never, ever trust these CCISD committees. We need to be front and center at every committee meeting, not just wait until recommendations are released. Oversight is necessary at every step of the way.

Challenge accepted, Mr. Frilot. There is only one district committee that will hold meetings in the 2019-2020 school year. If you’re interested in making sure CCISD does the right thing, readers should find out when and where the meetings are taking place, and go to each and every one of those meetings. Make your voice heard. Otherwise, by the time it gets to public hearing, your voice won’t matter:

School Health Advisory Council – this group is “board-appointed,” so you know, once again, it’s full of plants. It’s been meeting since last year, when the original cabal could appoint the members. It’s time members of the public started sitting in.

In a former SBAC member’s own words: you can’t wait until the recommendations are released. You can’t trust any of the CCISD committees. Showing up at public hearings isn’t enough. You have to be “involved” at every single meeting to have your voice heard.